NationStates Jolt Archive

I have recently had to resurrect my nations. That went fine.

Of course I had to resettle them in their originating regions. That went fine, too.

Unfortunately, they all lost their flags. (D'Oh!) Luckily, I had them all saved beforehand and therefore could upload them again. That went fine also.

However, and that's the problem, about 75% of my nations seem to have "forgotten" their flags in the course of the last days again and I had to re-upload them yet again.

I did that yesterday, and again today.

Is this a known bug - or is there a menu from which I shouldn't log off?

I remember checking the nations' settings before logging off to see if the settings were to my liking. Those seem to be the nations that have lost their custom flags. Instead it reads "nation's flag" or something in a box where my flags should've been.

Help or advice would be appreciated because uploading them each and every day gets kinda annoying.

Thanks.

A flag disappeared off a nation in my region today. We have two other nations, one with over 4 billion citizens, with no flags, either.

Traveling around in other regions, I see other nations with no flags. Broken links? Lost data? Either way, the disappearing flag bug appears to be spreading.

:eek:
Mayor for Life
Ulthar

I have raised this to the admins as a Bug Report.

A quick spin through The World shows that this appears to be affecting less than 1% of nations. I just logged in and my custom flag was fine. Maybe it's a format thing.

Frisbeeteria,

Thank you! :hail:

I suspect it's not a formatting thing because flags old and new are going poof, but the IT mantra of "it shouldn't do that" is job security for folks like me.

When multiple links like this fail, I alert equipment geeks immediately. Broken links and/or vanishing data might require be the result of a small coding problem (more or less easily fixed) or it might be the harbinger of an on line equipment failure (best prevented).

I appreciate your kind attention to this.

I suspect it's not a formatting thing because flags old and new are going poof

Format, not formatting. I refer to this post
;14204472']Okay, that just got too embarrassing. You can now upload PNG and GIF flags without having to rename them.
It's possible that you have something that's neither PNG, GIF, nor JPG. It's possible the system is rejecting JPG images with a JPEG extension. It's possible that the game now rejects flags with a PNG format but a JPG extension.

In short, I don't know exactly what was done, but I do know that there were recent changes in the image format acceptance code, and that would be the first place I'd look.

Ah! Silly me. :D Thx for the clarification.

Might be a cross platform thing? Some apps use different means of saving what in theory are identical file types depending on operating system. I know that the instance of one common program, Pshop, jpg and jpeg files in Windoze are not identical to those created in OSX and THAT might be causing it.

I did see a lot of broken flags today in older nations, ergo, made using an older file format. Recent changes in code are the first place I'd start, too.

Cheers!

I have raised this to the admins as a Bug Report.
Thanks.
A quick spin through The World shows that this appears to be affecting less than 1% of nations. I just logged in and my custom flag was fine. Maybe it's a format thing.
I sincerely doubt that it's a format thing for the flags I uploaded the other day are direct saves (as in "Save Image As...") from my nations when the flags worked just fine.
They include .gif and .jpg formats that have worked fine before without any problems, in both pixel and kb size.

So far the flags that I re-uploaded to my nations are still there - I hope it stays that way.

Thanks for helping.

That happened to me, too. I just reuploaded my flag.

That happened to me, too. I just reuploaded my flag.
Did you also have a message under "National Happenings" that said you've updated your flag - although you actually didn't?

Seems to only affect uploaded flags with a '.jpg' extension, but otherwise not sure what's going on yet.

I see a lot of missing flag images, but I can't reproduce the problem. If anyone can chime in with more info -- ideally, "My flag disappears when I do this" -- that would be super.

;14221947']I see a lot of missing flag images, but I can't reproduce the problem. If anyone can chime in with more info -- ideally, "My flag disappears when I do this" -- that would be super.
As I said, my flags disappeared after I checked on my nations' settings in that menu and without going back to the main page, logged off.

When I logged in again, the flag was gone, and under "nation's news" (or some such) it read that I had changed my nation's flag, which I didn't. It just disappeared and couldn't be found.

However, I couldn't reproduce it after that. Huh.

only affecting less than 1% of nations!? I think it is more than that.

over the years I've accumulated quite a few nations and am continuing to lose nation flags each day. I don't know what causes it. I thought it happened when updating the national settings, but it has been happening on nations which I didn't do anything with. this one nation was fine for four days, but without even logging in, it lost its flag today. now that I think about it, it must have something to do with updating the national settings, because I had to go through all of my nations and change the password because of bad log-in attempts. I have roughly 170 nations, and out of this I would say 20 of them have lost flags.

every time I updated the national settings, it said I altered my flag, some nations lost the flag right away, others lost them a few days later ..

actually I've noticed a lucky glitch with nations who have lost flags today, I click the back link and there is the flag! it will take some time to replace all the flags though, I noticed the one for the sex pistols 1977 is gone too

here is another example of the glitch, looks like it does happen when settings are changed :

Seconds ago: F_ire changed nation type to "Recruiting Land".
Seconds ago: F_ire altered its national flag.

lol, but I didn't alter my flag! I hope it doesn't disappear

No offense [violet], but "I did this and it broke my flag" might not help because the problem with trying to recreate a glitch on a server is that you may never be able to, and even if you do, the glitch you create may or may not point to a CAUSE of the problem, it may just be evidence of a SYMPTOM.

As for how common this is, in our humble region of 25, we had three go poof. On three different days. One on an old nation and two on nations less than two months old. Ostensibly the three had nothing in common, including the "man behind the curtain" AKA end user. In our region, that's 12%.

This has happened on new and old flags in active and inactive nations. My best guess: something broke the links, which is most likely database corruption. The cause of that can be any number of things: new server code, hardware glitch, administrator error (like running a wonky script), or the gremlins I blame for every computer problem I never sort out.

Sometimes the fix has nothing to do with the cause. Any server admin with an ounce of humility knows it's hubris to actually believe that the last thing you did must be what fixed it. We just smile, put the screws back in and move on, hoping the next time we do whatever we just did, we get the same positive outcome.

When faced with a corrupt database, I restore or rebuild. If I were to suggest IRL that end users enter their data again, I'd get yelled at. If it's a singular event, then the fix ought to be a lot easier than if it is ongoing. If it's dead links and it's ongoing, asking everyone to restore their flag won't fix anything.

:headbang:

something broke the links, which is most likely database corruption. When faced with a corrupt database, I restore or rebuild.

Which would be fine if NS were based around a database, but it isn't. It's flat file, and national flags are stored externally in other flat files. The disappearances appear to be tied to an update event, either manual through settings or automated via daily update. Also, Sex Pistols' report indicates that the linked flags aren't disappearing - instead it's somehow corrupting the links, which can 'spontaneously' get uncorrupted. All of that points back to the code change, not corrupted files or databases.

Nobody knows the game code and back end better than [violet]. Best thing to do is respond appropriately to requests for information and let the admins do the troubleshooting.

here is another example of the glitch, looks like it does happen when settings are changed :

Seconds ago: F_ire changed nation type to "Recruiting Land".
Seconds ago: F_ire altered its national flag.

lol, but I didn't alter my flag! I hope it doesn't disappear
I remember that one of my nations changed its "category" - that was among the ones which lost their flag.

Anyway, thanks for looking into the matter. So far none of the re-uploaded flags have disappeared again. *keeps fingers crossed*

However, one flag looked "corrupted". Upon checking the image I discovered that it was a bmp with a .jpg ending. I have fixed that now.

Frisbeeteria,

If I have offended, I apologize. :$

Broken links in flat files? Yikes. I tried like crazy to reproduce the missing flag bug but I couldn't so I offered the best guess I could based on my own experience. I'm the guy who gets yelled at when servers don't behave as advertised IRL, so I understand it can be frustrating when people who don't understand give advice you don't need.

At some point it's in the best interest of [violet] and the security of NS to not disclose too much detail about the structure of the site and the code. I spoke out of ignorance but I mean no disrespect. I was just trying to be a useful engine.

Best wishes debugging.

It would be a truly remarkable coincidence if this wasn't related to the new flag code.

Unfortunately all I know is that the custom flags of some nations are being deleted by the game at apparently random times. I've added some logging code to help figure out why, but it would really help if I knew what was triggering it. I've tried everything I can think of to get my test nation's flag to disappear, but it is stubbornly refusing to.

[violet] - the flags that disappeared in my Region were on different days and in this order:
New Rogernomics - arrived in our region sans flag, not yet restored
Killer Kitten - arrived with flag, lost it, same image as before restored
Moe the Dumber - had a custom flag since founding, went poof, now a different image restored (on one of my many hunches that lead nowhere)

It's always toughest to sort out what you expect but isn't happening.

Happy debugging.

Fixed now.

I believe what was happening was triggered by clicking "Update Settings" on your nation's Settings page when you had a custom JPEG flag that was stored internally in the old format (sans extension). Even though you weren't updating your flag, the game thought you were because it saw a difference between the current flag (no extension) and the flag's actual image file (with extension): it then deleted the old (current) flag and replaced it with the new (nonexistent) one.

There is unfortunately no easy way to restore flags that were deleted. But if you re-upload them, they will stick around, since nobody's flags will disappear from now on.

[violet],

Excellent. :hail:

Nothing is random. We just fail to see the connections and the meaning when we think something is.

There are no coincidences. Not on NS and not IRL.

Cheers!